[SOLVED] How to alternative way (!pic2plot) to generate sequence diagrams from some declarative textual form?

How to alternative way (!pic2plot) to generate sequence diagrams from some declarative textual form?

There is pic2plot component from UMLGraph to draw sequence diagrams (sequence.pic).

Input format is like:

.PS
copy "/usr/local/lib/sequence.pic"; 

object(N0,"0"); 
object(N1,"1"); 

step();

message(N0,N0,"doSomething()"); 
message(N0,N1,"callFunction()");

step();

.PE

The main disadvantage is that it is based on pic2plot which looks abandoned, fails to handle UTF-8 and have hard-to-find documentation (even man plotutils does not have a full set of useful man pages).

Is there alternatives draw sequence diagrams from simple text-based input without GUI?

Note: Now using this hack:

cat mpiseq.pic | u8h | pic2plot -T svg | xml2 | perl -pe 's!/svg/\@height=8in!/svg/\@height=32in!; s!/svg/\@viewBox=0 0 1 1!/svg/\@viewBox=0 -0.2 1 3.8!' | 2xml | h8u | svg

u8h/h8u masks/unmasks UTF-8 characters as sequence of hex digits (protected by signatures)

Solution

I've tried sdedit, which couldn't even process its own example!

Among the myriad of tools, plantuml stands out in my book: can handle pretty complex features with crisp clear syntax.

@startuml
Alice->Bob : hello
note left: this is a first note

Bob->Alice : ok
note right: this is another note

Bob->Bob : I am thinking
note left
    a note
    can also be defined
    on several lines
end note
@enduml